Granary or lighthouse first

[gramm87]

Hello all,
In those 1 tile - 1 seafood island and similar, is it generally better to build a granary first or a lighthouse (assuming the workboat is ready on settle)?
Thanks

 

[Swordnboard]

Some preliminary testing suggests that, with fish, a granary first is about 10 ahead of a lighthouse first, whereas with clam a lighthouse first is ahead by 2. My intuition says that the granary gets better when we have multiple seafoods or useful land tiles, since it basically doubles food surplus while a lighthouse adds one per population point working an ocean tile. OTOH, if you decided to settle an island with no seafood at all, the lighthouse would win by a large margin.

(Micro used: whip first item 4-2, work resource + a citizen until ready to whip second item for 1 population. It's possible that this strategy isn't optimal, though)

I also think this kind of question has been answered quite extensively elsewhere on the forums, but don't quite remember where to find it, so definitely worth searching for.

 

[elmurcis]

Now that was good question I had to answer to myself too with some testing.
Without traits (ORG/EXP), we are talking about whipping here to finish both. (in situation when city works only on one of both buildings and no units or something else built during this period)
So in general its 2-pop whip as soon as city grows to size 4. For Granary there is something - whip but don't finish, build Lightnouse until food bar half full and only than finish. But even with this method (and finishing Granary at correct turn) - after testing result was slightly better for Lighthouse 1st. This was true for both - Fish (5F) and Crab/Clam (4F) situations.

 

[Fippy]

Without testing i would think the same as Swordnboard, LH benefits more when tiles are weaker, while granary gives more food as growing speed increases.

 

[Snowbird]

Assuming you do it properly -- first building is probably at ~T14 (whip warrior as soon as size two is reached, hire citizen again at size two to scramble 30 hammers), with next coming in ~10 turns. In order for granary to be close one would need couple 2>1 warrior whips (which IIRC, beat citizen for production (and certainly beats growing onto 1F npo hammes tiles) as long as happiness holds).

So if you have fish and lots happiness granary first might be an option, but likely looses bunch of commerce to shave like turn (maybe two).

Ofcourse there is worker whip approaches (abusing fact that you can get food into bin and towards growth on one turn), which are slower but, well, produces worker for other needs.

 

[Anysense]

I've done a bit of testing with fish. Granary first is slightly better if a city grows before whipping second building, because stored food is>LH bonus. If not, then lighthouse first is slightly better. That may be 2-3 difference due to 2-3 turns earlier LH, while the same amount of food was stored in granary. Second case would require some extra hammers to whip second builing almost instantly after the first one. That might be GA or 2 center.

 

[sampsa]

Some preliminary testing suggests that, with fish, a granary first is about 10 ahead of a lighthouse first, whereas with clam a lighthouse first is ahead by 2.

This is pretty shocking to me. I'd have guessed granary wins by a lot more, simply because lighthouse is +1, while granary almost doubles gained per turn.

 

[gramm87]

Assuming you do it properly -- first building is probably at ~T14 (whip warrior as soon as size two is reached, hire citizen again at size two to scramble 30 hammers), with next coming in ~10 turns. In order for granary to be close one would need couple 2>1 warrior whips (which IIRC, beat citizen for production (and certainly beats growing onto 1F npo hammes tiles) as long as happiness holds).

Wow that's quite nice, I didn't think of whipping warriors into granary... In fact I don'T whip warriors into anything Yeah those kind of island cities I often build quite late, so at this point happiness is not a problem for small cities.

Anyway it doesn't seem to make a big difference, with the granary being just a little bit better according to the other posts...
Thanks for the answers

 

[Snowbird]

If it happens late... I think sending mining exec is strictly optimal...